


Safe Return

by SearchingWanderer17



Series: Ace Combat Monologues [1]
Category: Ace Combat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-08 20:33:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4319058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingWanderer17/pseuds/SearchingWanderer17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An inner monologue for Mobius 1 during the mission Safe Return from Ace Combat 4</p>
            </blockquote>





	Safe Return

Things have been slow, lately. Almost calm. After we destroyed Stonehenge, command saw fit to lay off us a bit, give us all a bit of a break. Morale would have been high even without this reprieve because of Stonehenge and the Yellow kill, but with this it soared. And we weren’t the only ones: all the forces of ISAF felt it: invigorated by the destruction of the railgun network. You could almost see it on the map, just by the updated progress of our armies.

It can’t last, of course. We’ve got to get back into the war sometime, and so I’m not really surprised when they send me out, but I am a bit surprised at the mission. They tell me the spy plane, “Leopard,” has information crucial to the war effort, and failing to retrieve it could be devastating. They tell me Gnome Ravine, which it has to pass through, is impassable for Leopard without radar, and is, conveniently, filled with radar jammers. Alright then, a nice quiet mission to get back into the swing of things. No problem.

Gnome Ravine itself is draped in a thick fog, making for atrocious visual conditions. The areas to the north and south are clearer, but that doesn’t really matter when my operation takes place in the ravine itself. As I enter the ravine, and Sky Eye gives me some details on the jamming stations (floating balloons; they remind me of the old barrage balloons I would see in pictures from the older wars, in the early days of combat aviation) I strap on my oxygen mask and settle into The Zone. This is easy. Just gotta stay patient and methodical, and keep my eyes sharp, and this’ll be a walk in the park.

Sky Eye patches Leopard into my comms, and they relay their situation, and their rough distance. For the first time I hear the voices of those whose lives are in my hands. I take one deep breath and go to work. I line up the first balloon (at this point I know my aircraft well enough to know where the gun fires even without the gun reticule’s automated range-based appearance) and squeeze off a few rounds. They rip straight through the balloon with no problem, and it quickly goes up in an explosion of flame and fabric. They must be filled with hydrogen, or something else flammable, and when the flames clear there’s nothing left. I move my head, scanning the area outside my cockpit, trying to see like a hawk or an eagle, and spot another balloon: another brown blip against the background landscape. I adjust my course and move on my next target.

At some point, a strange sensation comes over me. The landscape is eerily haunting, but in a way that’s almost beautiful. Maybe it’s the fog, but something about this place is seeping into me, leaking in through the seams in the aircraft. Is the canopy fogging over? I reach up and wipe it away, suddenly acutely aware of my breath coming through the oxygen mask. As I bring my hand back down I become aware of my aircraft around me, I _feel_  its presence, for what seems like the first time. I can feel the shaking, the vibrations, the little sounds and rattles echoing through the craft. I can see the screws and bolts in the cockpit, holding everything together, like a man pulling two taught lengths of rope towards each other, all working in concert with the other screws and nuts and bolts and pieces all over the plane.

I shake it off and go back to my mission. I’ve found a river leading through the ravine, and so I follow it. I have no particular locations to seek, after all, as long as I’m in the ravine. I clean up three more balloons before it happens. Bullets. They whiz by my cockpit, past my craft, coming from down below. I push the throttle, roll, and pull away from the source, keeping the location in my mind’s eye. When I’m clear I circle back, looking for the source of the shots. There, on the river: a grey spot against the earth: a gunboat of some kind, sitting on the river. The decision to attack it is easy; it may be contributing to the jamming, and, even if it isn’t, it could jeopardize my mission in a number of ways. What if it calls for reinforcements? Or if Leopard passes over it unknowingly? I sweep in at a low angle, and unleash my gun as soon as I’m in range and lined up. Bullets pepper the ship, landing like a metal rain, and they fire back, intent on knocking me from my perch. In the back of my mind, as I make my attack, I see, or rather  _feel,_ a bullet rip through my plane, somewhere to my left, but I stay the course. I get lucky, and after a moment something in the ship explodes; I can see it rip in half from where I am.

I pull up and out of my attack, leveling off so I can inspect my damage. Craning my neck around, I look left and see a nice clean hole in my left wing, just under halfway out from the fuselage, some inches back from the wing's leading edge. There are no moving parts there, nothing is leaking, and nothing is on fire so I let it go, but just to be safe I feel the plane, letting my body, my consciousness, stretch out through the airframe, sensing for changes. It’s handling the same and there’s no noticeable impact so I breathe easy and return to my mission.

Or I would, normally, but this time something’s different. I can really _feel_ the plane, sense it again, like I could before, all the pieces and parts. I can hear my breathing almost rattling through my mask like I’m hearing someone else. I have a moment of clarity regarding the water droplets on my canopy; the tiny water particles in the fog which hit hard like bugs on a windshield, then smear across the top and sides before slipping off and careening away in the air. For a moment, I feel like the water is in my visor, against my face, on and in my eyes as I shoot through the sky, my front metal knives slicing through the air, which buffets me as I muscle through it, pushed with unbelievable force by the massive engines in back, filled with power, leaving fiery lances in my wake.

I bring my hand up to my face but of course it only meets my visor. I sit there for a moment, some unconscious part of me trying to lift it up and get to my face, the rest of me, my conscious mind and my training, trying to get me to go back to the mission.

Then, there’s a loud “Beep!” in my earpiece and I hear: “Three miles, we’re almost there!”

Leopard is closing in. The weight of my mission comes falling back down on top of me: those people, in that plane, _I_  am responsible for them. I need to save them, to protect them.

My hand comes back down to the controls and I kick back into mission mode. I have no idea how many jammers I need to destroy to clean the radar up enough for Leopard to get through, but I’m going to kill as many as possible.

I can still feel the hole, though. Just on my left, past my shoulder. It never goes away. Is that rattling noise real, or am I imagining it? Some number of destroyed balloons later, as I destroy another jammer, angling right to avoid the flame, iss when it happens: “BEEP This is Leopard, we’re _at_  Gnome Ravine.”

So that’s it. I can do no more. I take one last quick scan of the skies to see if I can’t find another balloon, but I see nothing. I level out and wait. There’s a tightness in my chest as the seconds tick by in silence. At some point, I become aware that I’ve stopped breathing. I reach up and unstrap the oxygen mask from my left side, letting it fall to hang loose from the right of my helmet, and breathe. It’s a great big gasping breath at first, then a few smaller, louder puffs, before my breathing returns to normal. But I can still hear it, almost rattling, filling the cockpit. There’s nothing else to hear. God, please, let this oppressive silence lift. Let Leopard speak.

Then, finally, after several lifetimes, or no time at all, “Leopard here. Thank heavens, noise is clear and radar’s back online!”

I don’t think I started holding my breath (didn’t I just fix my breathing a moment ago? Or was it an hour ago?) but when they say it, I exhale deeply, all my stress leaving with the air. I did it. No one will die today because of my failures. My best was, for today at least, good enough.

Sky Eye comes on: “Mobius 1, intercept all enemy fighters. Shoot down all bandits and protect the reconnaissance aircraft.” They’re already on my radar, four of them, from the north. Two Typhoons and two Strike Eagles. Now, this I can do. _This_ , I know I’m good at. I strap my oxygen mask back on, angle my plane to intercept the fighters and push the throttle, moving out of the ravine to the north. I don’t go to full after burner (no need to rush) but I proceed at a good pace nonetheless.

As I approach, I can hear the enemy over my radio, coming from Sky Eye’s enemy intercept feed: “There’s our target, 12 o’clock low. Commence firing.” “There’s one escort.” “A ribbon…he’s the one who shot down Yellow 4.”

Ah, so they know me then. Excellent. A little half-smile creeps onto my face.

“Keep your guard up and stay together. Don’t fight single-ship.” At this I smile fully: That’s not going to help them.

Before final approach, I check my ammo: having not touched my missiles, I still have all four of them, but I’m down to less than 200 rounds in my cannon. That’s not very many. I’ll just have to be careful and not miss.

When we meet, they break off and work in pairs, the two Eurofighters forming one team and the two F-15Es forming the other.

The Typhoons aren’t making good enough use of their maneuverability; I guess they want to bait me, to set me up for the Strike Eagles. They succeed, but the Eagles aren’t fast enough. I drop in behind the Typhoon formation, lock on, and release a missile. It annihilates one before the Eagles have even finished lining me up. The other Typhoon, the lead of the two, breaks off just as the Eagles drop in behind me. I’ve anticipated their arrival, though, and am already evasive by the time they get a bead on me. As I peel away, they break apart, splitting up in an attempt to catch me in a three-plane cyclone of swirling unpredictability, but apparently they didn’t let the Typhoon pilot in on the plan. He’s still heading away, no doubt to regroup from the loss of his wingman before turning around to rejoin the fight. With only two planes when they were maneuvering for three, I quickly find a hole in the Eagles’ formation and break through. As I turn back around to face them, their swirling trap leaves them both very much open in front of me. I gain lock and fire, first at one, then the other. The first shot is a direct hit in the underbelly of the plane, obliterating it as the missile pierces right through the middle. The other Strike Eagle, however, turns his old maneuver into a clever corkscrew of some kind, twisting around and evading my missile. It’s a brilliant maneuver, I've got to give him credit, but it doesn’t seem to have meshed well with what he’d been doing before; it leaves him slow, almost stalled, strung out in front of me with nowhere left to go; he didn’t even break my lock. So I fire my last missile and, without fanfare, it sails straight towards him and connects.

Only the Typhoon remains, and I’m down to my cannon. With a full load of ammunition this wouldn’t be a problem, but with less than 200 rounds left I’ll only get a precious few seconds of firing before I’m left totally unarmed.

He’s using his superior maneuverability to great effect, but I’m faster and more stable. We twirl and twist around each other, dancing in a dizzying waltz like two snakes twisted up together in zero gravity. The battle stays even until I’m pulling upward, trying to gain altitude, when my plane seems to lose some power. It falters, just a second, and he slips in behind me; gains lock. He’s going to fire, and I can feel the problem now: my left side, it’s drooping, pulling down. I look left, looking at the hole in my wing. It looks the same. No leak, no visible problems, but I can finally hear it now: I can hear my plane talking to me, as if to say: “Here, here, you have to drop and twist, come over here. Let me show you.”

With no other option, I roll left and pull the stick hard as he fires at me and the missile warning begins to blare at me, my entire HUD lighting up a blazing red. I pull back _hard_ on the stick, as hard as I can, turning, hoping, believing. I can feel the shaking in the plane, the vibrations, the force. Is that my imagination, or did I just feel the missile streak by, it’s aerodynamic trail pushing air into the backs of my engines? I’m holding my breath again, only realizing it when I exhale as the missile alert vanishes and my HUD returns to green.

Following my plane’s lead, I push the pedals and yaw left slightly, nosing down, before rolling to level and pulling up. And there he is: The Typhoon, noticing me drop down, he had pulled _up_ , probably in an attempt to sweep around and drop down on me from above. Instead, I am now pulled up right underneath him, lined up perfectly, in a straight line. A moment later, my gun reticule appears. I’m close. I angle my nose up just enough to line up the reticule and squeeze the trigger: I watch as tracers fly all around him, and into him, as sparks fly from the points of contact, and pieces of metal shear off under my lead onslaught. After a couple of beats his plane breaks apart. I relinquish the trigger and turn away to avoid any debris. Leveling out, as Sky Eye reports my success, I check my ammo counter: it’s down to the single digits. If I had missed that burst, I’d have been left helpless.

I could, of course, wonder what that would have meant. Would I have been told to retreat and RTB? To wait for reinforcements? To distract them until Leopard got some more distance from the attackers? Or told to stay indefinitely, and sacrifice myself to guarantee Leopard’s escape?

But I refuse to wonder. That sort of thing is just back luck. You simply don’t do it. Things happened as they did, and you’re going home, and that’s what matters.

Today, I get one more safe return.

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote this up as a representation of my own inner monologue from whenever I play this mission. I like to roleplay this one a bit, placing myself inside the cockpit, rather than just playing the game and executing mission objectives. This mission has one of my favorite atmospheres from any Ace Combat game, from the music to the environment to the actual mission scenario, and I was prompted to finally actually write it down so I could share it in this thread from the Ace Combat Subreddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/acecombat/comments/3baln7/ace_combat_stories_time/
> 
> It's really just a one-off but if you'd like more I could give it a shot. I welcome constructive criticism and new ideas/recommendations.
> 
> Have a nice day!


End file.
